We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Angela Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Angela, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

A big new trend are hat bars. Businesses will pop up in a boutique or somewhere like that and bring a variety of hats like the popular trucker hats, and a variety of patches and the customer picks a hat and patches they want and the business will make the hat onsite for them. This has really helped my business become very busy in the last few weeks, as I make and sell patches. So, it’s been great to see other small businesses using my patches as a tool in their business to succeed. To see that someone likes what you make is what brings me the most joy.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have been crafting in some way or another since I was little. My mother passed away when I was just 6 years old, and I had special family friend that would bring me to her house and she would let me paint and craft in all kinds of ways. I have always loved to draw as well, but I really like working with my hands. At one time I made and sold wreaths, then items with vinyl when the Cricut first came out, then I started making leather earrings, which lead me to sublimation. I love that with sublimation you can make a wide variety of items. I love accessories and gifts, so I mainly stick to earrings, hats, patches, tea towels, blankets, can koozies, mugs, and now I also make some Stanley toppers for the popular Stanley tumblers, and more. That’s my biggest problem probably, is trying to narrow down what I make and offer. I want to make it all! haha

I am a believer in that you can choose to be happy or see the silver lining in situations. Life has not always been easy for me, but I choose to keep my head up and do what I can to make it better. I believe kindness and respect go a long way and should be given to make the world a better place. My shop is called Infinite Grace because I believe everyone should be given grace always. No one is perfect and if we treated each other with more kindness the world would be a much better place.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

I mainly sell on Etsy. I do also sell on my social media sites, but most of my orders do come through Etsy. I would say there are pros and cons to everything, but for Etsy the pros are the traffic that my shop gets. I don’t believe if I had my own website, that I would be able to get the traffic and views that I do on Etsy. It’s fairly simple to set up a shop and add your products. The cons are definitely the fees that are taken out of my profits. I understand any site will charge a fee to let you use their online ecommerce, but I know a lot of people feel that Etsy charges too much in fees. Luckily I have not had an issue, but I have heard of others that also feel like Etsy doesn’t support the sellers. I feel like Etsy is trying to do better in that area. Etsy does make it easy to ship and keep my orders in place so I can keep up with orders easily.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I first started with sublimation, I wanted to sell hats with the cute patches on them, but I couldn’t find anyone selling the cute patches by themselves, or really couldn’t find blank ones so I could make my own. So, I researched what material was needed to make the frayed patches. Tried different materials to figure out which ones worked best and started trying to sell hats with the patches. I sold some, but not like I was hoping to. So, I listed the blank patches for sell on Etsy for other people to make their own patches and they took off! So, then I turned to selling ones with the designs on them, those also started selling well. Then I decided maybe I should focus more on the patches themselves than the completed hats. But I still love offering accessories and gifts, that’s when I decided I would open a second Etsy shop. One to sell the cute, completed accessories & gifts, and one is more for just my patches. Now that the hat bars are a hot trend, they are really selling well. Sometimes we have to pivot more than once, but that’s what owning a business is about. I also had to pivot when we decided it was best to homeschool our youngest daughter when she was in fourth grade. It was not a plan we had, but what was best for her and us as a family. Then when I started my Etsy shops, I had to figure out how best to try to balance creating, homeschooling, being a wife, mom, and taking care of my health and just life as it is. Which most women have to deal with. Now she’s in ninth grade, but I still don’t feel like I know how to balance it all, but we just try our best and if everything doesn’t work out on one day, we try again the next!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.etsy.com/InfiniteGraceSubs
• Instagram: www.instagram/InfiniteGraceShop
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/InfiniteGraceShop
• Other: I actually have 2 Etsy shops.
• http://www.etsy.com/shop/InfiniteGraceSubs
• http://www.etsy.com/shop/InfiniteGraceShopCo